Noncompliant by Carmen Segarra

Noncompliant by Carmen Segarra

In 2011, Carmen Segarra took a job as a regulator at Goldman Sachs for the New York Fed. It was an opportunity, she believed, to monitor the big bank's behavior in order to avoid another financial crisis.

Shocked to discover that Goldman did not have a conflict of interest policy, she immediately issued a report. But her superiors pressured her to modify the report, covering up her discovery. It was then that she realized the full extent of the collusion between Goldman and the Fed and began to record meetings and conversations with her superiors. When she refused to change her report, Segarra was dismissed from her job. Shortly thereafter she released her audio recordings, exposing the Fed's inefficiency in holding the bank accountable.

In this hard-hitting exposé, Segarra chronicles her experience blowing open the doors on the macro-level corruption, ineffectiveness, and illegal behavior of the big banks and the government bodies set up to regulate them. From the moment she became a whistleblower, countless employees of regulatory bodies and banks have come to Segarra to share testimonies of cover-ups they have witnessed. In Noncompliant, she reveals how common these practices are, and shows how the culture of corruption that is not only accepted but encouraged in these companies filters down to the individual employees. In the process of unraveling these connections, she explains to readers how, ultimately, this systemic corruption affects us all.

Carmen Segarra leaked audio recordings after being fired from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, showing the Fed's ineffectiveness lack holding the bank accountable. A combined ProPublica and This American Life piece (published on September 26, 2014) featured some of the recordings. Segarra, who previously served as the National Policy and Outreach Chair of the Hispanic National Bar Association, is now a proponent of regulatory transparency and change. She is a New Yorker.